I can understand ideas getting lost in the shuffle of French ingenuity. Indeed, French minds came up with the bicycle, the metric system, and let's not forget the guillotine!
But here I want to introduce you to Auguste Mouchot and A.E. Becquerel.
Mouchot, then a mathematics instructor in Tours, wrote about his energy worries in 1860:
"It would be prudent and wise not to fall asleep regarding this quasi-security...Eventually industry will no longer find in Europe the resources to satisfy its prodigious expansion. Coal will undoubtedly be used up. What will industry do then?"
The young teacher then set about harnessing the sun's rays to create power, using giant iron cauldrons and plates of glass to generate increasingly large amounts of steam. He secured his first patent only a year after he wrote the above words, and by 1878 was able to use his devices to - paradoxically - create ice using solar heat, in the process wowing the crowds of the Paris Exposition.
Subsequent tests proved Mouchot's creation to be a promising technical success, but practically it was not as valuable as diplomacy. As relations between England and France cooled into détente in the 1880s, solar power ground to a halt and cheap coal launched Europe full-throttle into the Industrial Age.
But now we stand in the opposite situation. The traditional use of coal has run its course in the western industrialized nations, geopolitics are boiling hot in the world's primary resource-producing regions, and Mouchot's brainchild - along with Parisian A.E. Becquerel's photovoltaic effect - could launch France and the rest of the world into a new era of abundant fuel.
To repeat Mouchot stridently:
It would be prudent and wise not to fall asleep regarding this quasi-security.
The Dawn of a New France
20-story rectangular boxes, lined up to the horizon like postmodern dominoes.
This is the France you don't see on tours.
But the residents of these areas, the banlieues (loosely, "suburbs") are making themselves visible, with riots like the ones that shook France for weeks this past autumn. Many ascribed the unrest to religious tensions, but if that is true it is also correct to say that the ingredients of discontent were heated by the boiling pot of the banlieue.
These are the anti-'burbs, whose etymology ban-lieue means a zone where no unauthorized trade is permitted. There are nice ones like Versailles, but the conflagrations and overturned cars popped up in run-down districts like Clichy-sous-bois, where soccer goals have no nets and lawns are theoretical.
These are the analogs of US inner cities, and likewise they have been disemboweled by dying industry.
I say these places must become the incubators for France's new solar era.
A Roof is Not Enough
On Scotland's Isle of Bute, near Glasgow, there stands a public housing project unlike any other I've seen - A'Chrannag ("Crow's Nest" in Scots Gaelic).
A'Chrannag is a zero-heating complex, designed by award-winning architect Gokay Deveci, whose designs make use of sustainable and renewable energy to keep living conditions bright and affordable.
Triple-glazed glass, south-facing windows, and heavy insulation in Deveci's designs are the antithesis of the terrible "towerblocks" that ring many European cities.
Those are dens of despair, with dark and dangerous staircases and broken glass.
What is needed is renewed infrastructure based on light - from the sun and to the people - letting the industrial core revive by building photovoltaic cell factories in places like Clichy-sous-bois and giving the area's resident's the same technology to live in that they create at work.
When Swiss utilitarian architect Le Corbusier hatched his grand scheme for European industrial suburbs, he proclaimed, "We must start again from zero."
He was right, and now it's time for a new round. The existing structures in the banlieue were built of shoddy materials and are now high-rise shacks.
Speaking after the 2005 riots, French journalist Emmanuel Desrues remarked, "These new areas were built in opposition to the city. A European city is first of all a place for social interaction, filled with squares where people can meet and exchange ideas, and engage in trade. In these suburbs there are absolutely no meeting places. They are simply bedroom communities with no center."
In a recent poll Challenges magazine revealed that 70% of French citizens thought that future generations would live less well. A full 72% think that French people today are, by and large, unhappy. (I can imagine Sartre smiling at this revelation.)
Even as France, which already produces more of its electricity from nuclear power than any other country (a full 80%), promises to build more nuclear plants, they would do well to remember the words of Monsieur Desrues.
It is the exchange of thoughts and ideas that made France great. Some of those notions now lie dormant, and neither the people nor the government can afford to let that situation persist if there is hope for a real renewal of joie de vivre.
Sam Hopkins files this report from Oxford, England, where he is attending the Solar Cities Congress. You can view updates and photos from his UK renewable energy tour (April 2-12) at www.orbusinvestor.com
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